I almost feel bad for Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who have contributed $10 million to the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super PAC. If it weren’t for the Supreme Court’s astonishingly wrongheaded Citizens United ruling, which among other things allows “independent” (hardly!) political committees to raise unlimited sums, the couple might have directed their millions to better use—like recapitalizing a casino or two.

The New York Times story on the latest Adelson donation notes that it “could substantially neutralize the millions of dollars already being spent in Florida by [Mitt] Romney and Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting him.” It also contrasts the Adelsons’ lump-sum game with more traditional get-out-the-vote operations where money is raised in chunks of no more than $2,500.
So presidential aspirants now run basically two fund-raising campaigns—the kind where they ask ordinary people to cough up relatively small sums, and the kind where they allow “independent” committees working on their behalf to pump extraordinarily wealthy people for extraordinary sums and pretend that these 1 percenters won’t have extraordinary influence over their administrations (in the event of an election victory).

I’d say it should be obvious to any rational person that this system is not good for democracy, but several Supreme Court justices stand in the way of that statement. I do take some comfort in the latest New York Times / CBS poll, which showed that about two-thirds of voters support limiting the amount of money that individuals can contribute to a campaign. As many say that spending by groups not affiliated with a candidate should be limited by law—including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

But clearly we can’t depend on politicians’ good will. Our current elected officials must find a way to counteract Citizens United legislatively. I had hoped that President Obama would say more about this issue in his State of the Union Address than he did. After all, when he pulled out of the public-financing system for presidential campaigns in 2008 (an act that was the death blow to that venerable system), he said he would work for campaign finance reform. Still waiting.